Everything Is Connected

This morning, on the way to the Met to attend a Q. & A. with Daniel Barenboim—who is celebrating the American release of his book “Music Quickens Time” (Verso), already published in Britain under the title “Everything Is Connected”—I happened to bump into the Maestro coming out of the subway. It is always convenient, under such circumstances, to be carrying the latest book of the author you happen to bump into, particularly if said author has not yet seen a copy of it. “Oh,” he said, in laconic Israeli-accented English, taking hold of the book, which has a picture of him on the cover, striking a pose reminiscent of Rodin’s “The Thinker,” whose dialogic philosophic spirit Barenboim embodies. “Is this the American edition? I haven’t seen it.” And no wonder. With his globe-trotting schedule and involvement with the Barenboim Said Foundation and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which he founded with the late Edward Said, with whom he co-wrote “Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society” it’s a miracle he had time to write it.

At the Q. & A., he spoke about music, conducting, politics, travels, colleagues, and much else. Asked why he bothered to write books rather than Wagnerian gesamkunstwerk, he said it was because he wasn’t a good composer. As for what he is currently reading, he was more effusive, because, as his book reveals, he is an omnivorous reader, with a particular fondness for Spinoza. One book he is reading happens to be a seven-hundred-and-twenty-page biography of King Hussein, by the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, “Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace,” which he finds interesting because it tells of events he lived through in the nineteen-fifties and sixties from the other side of the fence. Another is Prokofiev’s “Diaries 1907-1914: Prodigious Youth” (Cornell), which, in the English translation, is a mere eight hundred and thirty-five pages. Not that he’s necessarily reading these books in English; he is fluent in at least seven languages. He said he took up the diaries when he was conducting Prokofiev’s “The Gambler,” based on Dostoevsky’s novella, at La Scala last year. What he admires about a composer who always lived in the shadow of Stravinsky and Shostakovich is that he had “such a fantastic sense of irony and sarcasm and ability to laugh at everything.”

Clearly, Maestro Barenboim could have discussed books, and a good deal more, endlessly, but, unfortunately for us, there was the small matter of a large orchestra waiting to rehearse.